Not coming back: state support for higher ed

An excellent piece in the Chronicle about a recent NSF report, here. Most interesting to me what not the overall finding, but what the new President at CU Boulder has done in response:

He cited $8-million in savings by opting out of state procurement systems, $4-million in savings by adopting self-insurance, and $2.3-million from an insurance audit. The system also winnowed 209 procedural policies down to 89, making changes such as raising to $500 from $100 the threshold at which an event on a campus requires authorization paperwork.“I just told everybody when I got here, All right, let’s get through this place, and let’s clean it out, and let’s get rid of the stuff that doesn’t make sense, let’s get lean and mean,” Mr. Benson said.

This is an approach which might usefully be employed elsewhere. Note that, in contrast to the usual austerity imposed on the academic units, at CU administrative processes were systematically streamlined.